
National Geographic: Adventures - Panama Canal: The Mountain and the Mosquito
- Year:
- 1999
- 217 Views
The Panama Canal is completed.
The Atlantic and the Pacific are joined.
The most ambitious construction project
since the great pyramids of Egypt.
The work has spanned nearly
half a century,
Now it is finished and the world
is suddenly smaller.
But behind this epic tale,
there is another story
of two unsung heroes.
One is an engineer from the Rockies
with the vision to move mountains.
The other, a soft-spoken
Alabama physician
whose enemies are ignorance,
disease and death.
Together, they take on a wilderness
that had defeated the best engineers in the world.
Without either one,
the Panama Canal could not be built.
And yet, one of these visionaries
will suddenly and mysteriously
walk away
before the canal is finished.
And take the secret of his departure
to his grave.
The Republic of Panama,
Central America.
A barricade between two oceans.
With a blanket of jungle.
And a spine of mountains.
Today, 14,000 ships sail through
these peaks and forests each year.
Their miracle highway
is the Panama Canal.
One of the wonders of the modern world.
A miracle that,
on a rain-soaked day in July, 1905,
no one in Panama would
have believed possible.
At the port of Colon,
arrived to take control
of a dying dream.
At age 52, John Stevens has built
any other engineer in the world.
The Rocky Mountains
have been his home.
And spanning them his
greatest challenge... until now.
In Panama, yellow fever has killed
hundreds of workers,
most of them from the West Indies,
and terrified the rest.
The men call it The Great Scare.
But his orders come directly
from the President of the United States.
In his first address to Congress
Roosevelt vows to chop
and complete The Big Ditch.
"We must build the Isthmian Canal...
which remains to be undertaken
on this continent
is of such consequence
to the American people."
Roosevelt's motives are patriotic,
economic and military.
A canal would trim nearly a month
from the travel time
between New York and San Francisco.
Making the shortest path
between the oceans a superhighway
of American commerce
and the lifeline of
the nation's burgeoning two-ocean Navy.
Roosevelt inspires thousands of
young American laborers
to set off for Panama.
But they disembark in
a steaming hell.
Soaring heat...
punishing rains...
ancient jungles.
Temperatures top 130 and it can
In the unbroken forests,
innocent arrivals.
But the most mortal dangers
are too small to see
Confused, chaotic, and deadly.
Teddy Roosevelt's Big Ditch Project
is a quagmire
sucking up millions of dollars,
and hundreds of lives.
bureaucratic nightmare,
Roosevelt authorizes John Stevens
to ignore any orders
that do not come directly
from the White House.
Stevens agrees.
And he advises the
much younger president
to keep his promise.
I'm to have a free hand.
I'm not to be hampered
or handicapped by anyone high or low.
And I'm to stay on the Isthmus
only until success is assured.
It is no accident that
Stevens has been recruited.
For the Canal to succeed,
it must find a way
through the mountains
of the Continental Divide,
the backbone connecting
North and South America.
Roosevelt hopes America's
greatest railway man
can save his Canal
- and ensure his political future.
Stevens is a railroad man,
not a Washington insider.
Day after day he tramps
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"National Geographic: Adventures - Panama Canal: The Mountain and the Mosquito" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 7 Mar. 2021. <https://www.scripts.com/script/national_geographic:_adventures_-_panama_canal:_the_mountain_and_the_mosquito_14509>.